The paper will present a comparative examination of the temporalities of planning in two development poles, in Italy (Brindisi), and Portugal (Sines), created, respectively, in the late 1950s and early 1970s as areas of concentration of oil and coal-based industries and auxiliary mechanical activities. These two development areas, originating in different national contexts and under changing historical circumstances, have followed diverging trajectories, eventually resulting in two polarized and paradigmatic examples of deindustrialization (Brindisi) and industrial expansion (Sines) in the current context of the great restructuring that goes under the name of energy transition. The Brindisi Area of Industrial Development was part of a larger regional development pole, conceived during the years of the Italian “economic miracle” and within the framework of the “extraordinary” state intervention for the development of the South. The Sines Project was launched during the final years of the Estado Novo dictatorship (1971) and survived the oil crises, the Carnation Revolution and the independence of former African colonies. Brindisi took off during the post-World War II decades of capitalist expansion and Fordist effervescence, when the growth pole strategy was in its heyday in Europe. The Sines Project emerged at the beginning of a crucial decade of crisis and restructuring towards flexibilization and decentralization, when the very idea of centralized large-scale industrial planning was waning. The two cases were also characterized by the persistent difference between labour surplus (Brindisi) and labour shortage (Sines). Building upon extensive anthropological fieldwork and archival research, the paper will examine the conceptions and practices of time underlying the making and unmaking of development futures, at the intersection of state formations, capitalist temporal logics and concrete regional configurations of labour and social reproduction. The paper suggests that the comparative analysis of these two cases can offer useful insights into the political economy of time, planning and social reproduction in Southern Europe.

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Planning,Sines,Brindisi,Growth-poles,Development,Industrialization